Slashdot Mirror
When Good Spammers Go Bad
pfleming writes "According to this blog article on BadTux by Eric Green, the constant harrassment of spammers has a price. You get a Cease and Desist letter- or more correctly, your ISP gets a C/D letter. But, if you're a hard core geek you just might get your site more notice as it gets mirrored out onto sympathetic hosts.
Also mirrored in other locations."
becuase he'll go over his hourly cap in no time at all..
I was impressed with the article until I got to the comment "I mean, what do I care about what Windows losers get scammed out of?". Now I like Linux much as the next geek but thats just going to aliante people.
M$ might be a monopoly but at least they have bought some form of consistency
Rus
Cheap UK and US VPS
... You know the rest of it. Just as comic book characters have such a code, it would appear that computer geeks need one too.
It's obvious that the folks at evidence eliminator know a good bit about tech, and not enough about morality. A lot of other fine folks who run legit/non-shady companies have the same knowledge but don't use it to trick consumers into using their products (probably because they actually make something useful). Just because you have the power to do something doesn't mean you should use it. Imagine if the loyal slashdot crowd were to use our collective resources to advertise any one issue or cause.....
Let's get one thing perfectly clear, I did not vote for George W Bush, and I do not endorse what he does or says.
"
Damn, the trolls are busy this morning.
That this page generated a pop-up ad for Window Washer.
-- For evil to triumph it is enough that good men do nothing.
When good spammers go bad? Isn't that kind of pretentious thinking there are good spammers?
Help us build a better map!
Way too much FUD for a Monday!
I've got a file with ip addresses of spammers who've pissed me off enough to blacklist them. It's available at http://enthalpy.homelinux.org/spammers.txt.
/etc/firewall/spammers.txt`
/23 in the iptables might be too 'clumsy' for some. You can use /24 which blocks a smaller group of computers around the ip address in the list. /23 works fine for us.
;)
I use the following script:
for I in `cat
do
echo Blacklisting Spammer: $I/23
iptables -A INPUT -s $I/23 -j REJECT
done
to blacklist them.
I personally guanantee that all the addresses in this list have spammed me. If you don't believe / trust me, fine - don't use it. I use it on a production server and have never had any complaints...
By the way, the
The list is 98% asian dsl accounts.
Also, for an alternative solution, try this:
smbclient -L $IP_ADDRESS
where $IP_ADDRESS is the address of the computer that spammed you.
If you're in luck, you'll find yourself connecting to a Windows computer. It'll ask you for a password. Hit enter. If you're still in luck, it will list the available shares, and a list of server names. Pick a server name. If there are more than one, try each one
Now, download and compile 'smbdie'. Search for it on google. Run:
smbdie -i $IP_ADDRESS -p 139 -t $SERVER_NAME
where $SERVER_NAME is the server name you just picked from smbclient's output ( above ). If you are still in luck, you will have rebooted the spammer's computer ( it blue-screens ), and maybe even caused some data loss.
Really don't like them? Add the smbdie command to a cron job. I've found most spammers have fixed ip addresses, and they become available to reboot again withing approximately 2-3 minutes.
Enjoy!
I recently posted an "Ask Slashdot" article asking precisely what this code of ethics between coders should be. I believe there is one, and I believe that most coders act maturely and for the benefit of the wider community and good whilst also protecting each other. Would've been interesting to see what others thought on this. The scenario I had encountered was regards illegal software and whether you would report a colleague to FAST (or equivalent) after you or that person had left the company. I personally wouldn't... but here we found that someone would. Likewise... I would not wish harm, or act maliciously towards a Windows user or anyone else... even a spammer in some regards (use legal and legit ways to prevent them from harming me (e.g. filters) but not actively harm others to hurt them). Most of the time, my coding ethics, beyond the bond of workmates and industry, is in tune with my real world ethics... do what you want providing it doesn't hurt others. Oh, and before someone says anything... I couldn't RTFA as the site has been slashdotted... anyone got the text?
You're new here, right?
That can work for either party, there's nothing new about people filing law suits in order to prevent someone from doing the right thing. It is important to remember however when dealing with such assholes that a letter from a lawyer is not as intimidating and many people think. Lawyers write letters which have little or not legal value all the time, I've received some myself when my old landlord and his wife got divorced and were fighting over who was the landowner. The letter itself wasn't worth the paper it was printed on, but it did have an official legal letterhead. Always make sure you know your legal rights and never trust the other guy's lawyer to tell them to you.
When good Spammers go bad?
:: Jonsey's Head Explodes ::
Logically, the only good spammer, is a dead spammer.
Therefore, all good spammers are past their experation date already.
So logically, all good spammers must be bad.
I assert that my comment is only my opinion, not that of any employer, past, present or future.
..isn't that an oxymoron.
The only good spammer is a dead spammer. Are we talking zombies here?
SCO employee? Check out the bounty
from the whip-lash-from-slashdot dept.
vaderhelmet writes "According to this server error on BadTux by the webserver, the constant loading of pages has a price. You get a 425 error- or more correctly, you cannot connect to the host. But, if you're a hard core geek you just might get your site more notice as it gets mirrored out onto sympathetic hosts. Also slashdotted in other locations."
Very strange indeed. I have the opposite case here, Linux is responsive and fast but windows is sluggish and pretty much locks up for a long time if I try copying a large file.
Mirrored from news.badtux.net
Eric Green doesn't use Windows very much. A long-time Linux user and advocate since 1995, Windows software interests him about as much as, say, the price of pork bellies on the Chicago futures market. So why is the publisher of a much-spammed Windows software product trying to shut him down? Welcome to the wild and whacky story of the strangest bunch of spammer scammers on the Internet: those whacky folks at Robin Hood Software whose overpriced "Evidence Eliminator" software is spammed on every Internet forum on a regular basis. This is a tale of spammers and spam, and an unlikely spam fighter who has learned that spammers suck even worse than most people think. And in the end, it's the story of how spam fighters around the globe support each other when the spammers decide to go after their critics and detractors. It all started back in June 2000. At the time, I was researching encryption algorithms for use in a new software product. There was this product called 'Evidence Eliminator', produced by a company named 'Robin Hood Software', being hyped on the sci.crypt and alt.privacy newsgroups. Curious, I went to the web site of the publisher of the software. After being subjected to flash animation, popups threatening me with jail if I didn't buy Evidence Eliminator, and no way to contact the makers of the product other than a web form, I decided: "These people aren't credible." And said so. From my work account. Big mistake. I didn't realize I was dealing with spammers. I thought they'd be interested in seeing what an industry veteran thought. But there was no response to my message on the sci.crypt newsgroup. As far as I was concerned, that was the end of it. I went on with his life. But Andy Churchill, one of the principals of Robin Hood Software, wasn't so eager to let go. Imagine my surprise when, in early 2001, I ran a Google search for my name and discovered that I was part of a vast conspiracy by some strange New World Order collection of villains to destroy the makers of "the best security product on the market"! Naturally I wasn't happy. And as someone who isn't shy about expressing his opinion, I expressed it, sending EMAIL to Robin Hood Software demanding that they remove any mention of me from their site. Andy Churchill of Robin Hood Software iadmits to have received that EMAIL, but says, "we deleted it". There was no response from Robin Hood Software. So I did what comes naturally to any Linux geek: I put up a web page. Which Robin Hood Software swiftly (and in violation of my copyright) duplicated on their own web site, with "False." (no explanation) beside each of my points as to why you shouldn't buy their software. And as time went by and, thanks to the readers of my site, I accumulated more and more evidence about Robin Hood Software's activities, including evidence that they were behind the "push ICQ" spamming of their product (an EMAIL to their affiliates urging them to do that kind of spamming), Robin Hood Software's web site became yet more lurid, even to the point of duplicating a copyrighted gag photo (cropping out Agent Binks) on their own web site. These people don't appear to be too stable -- definite candidates for the aluminum foil beanie award. In early 2002 I purchased the domain name 'evidence-eliminator-sucks.com', and did a major overhaul of the web site to try to organize the by-then large amount of information that I'd accumulated about Robin Hood Software and its activities. By that time it was clear that these weren't nice people. Deceptive claims in their advertising, huge amounts of spam originating from their affiliates, ia browser hijack virus that hijacks people's web browsers and redirects them to the Evidence Eliminator home page, and their continued attempts to disparage their critics and competitors on their aptly-named Dis-Information page pretty much are a Major Clue. I also launched the "Evidence Eliminator Sucks Conspiracy" -- both a statement on what I feels is Robin Hood Software's paranoia in their rantings about a "vast conspiracy"
the constant harrassment of spammers has a price
Huh? Who's harrassing spammers?
You get a Cease and Desist letter- or more correctly, your ISP gets a C/D letter
Who gets a letter? The person harassing the spammer? I'm still confused.
But, if you're a hard core geek you just might get your site more notice as it gets mirrored out onto sympathetic hosts.
You'll get your site mirrored? Is that some sort or reward for harrassing the spammers? And what does being a "hard core geek" have to do with anything?
Aw crap, ninjas!
Mirrored from news.badtux.net
Eric Green doesn't use Windows very much. A long-time Linux user and advocate since 1995, Windows software interests him about as much as, say, the price of pork bellies on the Chicago futures market. So why is the publisher of a much-spammed Windows software product trying to shut him down? Welcome to the wild and whacky story of the strangest bunch of spammer scammers on the Internet: those whacky folks at Robin Hood Software whose overpriced "Evidence Eliminator" software is spammed on every Internet forum on a regular basis. This is a tale of spammers and spam, and an unlikely spam fighter who has learned that spammers suck even worse than most people think. And in the end, it's the story of how spam fighters around the globe support each other when the spammers decide to go after their critics and detractors. It all started back in June 2000. At the time, I was researching encryption algorithms for use in a new software product. There was this product called 'Evidence Eliminator', produced by a company named 'Robin Hood Software', being hyped on the sci.crypt and alt.privacy newsgroups. Curious, I went to the web site of the publisher of the software. After being subjected to flash animation, popups threatening me with jail if I didn't buy Evidence Eliminator, and no way to contact the makers of the product other than a web form, I decided: "These people aren't credible." And said so. From my work account. Big mistake. I didn't realize I was dealing with spammers. I thought they'd be interested in seeing what an industry veteran thought. But there was no response to my message on the sci.crypt newsgroup. As far as I was concerned, that was the end of it. I went on with his life. But Andy Churchill, one of the principals of Robin Hood Software, wasn't so eager to let go. Imagine my surprise when, in early 2001, I ran a Google search for my name and discovered that I was part of a vast conspiracy by some strange New World Order collection of villains to destroy the makers of "the best security product on the market"! Naturally I wasn't happy. And as someone who isn't shy about expressing his opinion, I expressed it, sending EMAIL to Robin Hood Software demanding that they remove any mention of me from their site. Andy Churchill of Robin Hood Software iadmits to have received that EMAIL, but says, "we deleted it". There was no response from Robin Hood Software. So I did what comes naturally to any Linux geek: I put up a web page. Which Robin Hood Software swiftly (and in violation of my copyright) duplicated on their own web site, with "False." (no explanation) beside each of my points as to why you shouldn't buy their software. And as time went by and, thanks to the readers of my site, I accumulated more and more evidence about Robin Hood Software's activities, including evidence that they were behind the "push ICQ" spamming of their product (an EMAIL to their affiliates urging them to do that kind of spamming), Robin Hood Software's web site became yet more lurid, even to the point of duplicating a copyrighted gag photo (cropping out Agent Binks) on their own web site. These people don't appear to be too stable -- definite candidates for the aluminum foil beanie award. In early 2002 I purchased the domain name 'evidence-eliminator-sucks.com', and did a major overhaul of the web site to try to organize the by-then large amount of information that I'd accumulated about Robin Hood Software and its activities. By that time it was clear that these weren't nice people. Deceptive claims in their advertising, huge amounts of spam originating from their affiliates, ia browser hijack virus that hijacks people's web browsers and redirects them to the Evidence Eliminator home page, and their continued attempts to disparage their critics and competitors on their aptly-named Dis-Information page pretty much are a Major Clue. I also launched the "Evidence Eliminator Sucks Conspiracy" -- both a statement on what I feels is Robin Hood Software's paranoia in their rantings about a "vast conspiracy" out
Erm, you mean like Microsoft Bad, Linux Good?
Blockwars: multiplayer and it's free!
"They do not preach that their god will rouse them, a little before the Nuts work loose." Kipling, 'The Sons of Martha'
... if someone wrote a nice piece of mass mailing software that would be free, look great, run fast, spam people like there's no tomorrow and available under a "free but get your paws of my source code" license? I mean, we don't want the spammers to be able to realize that their latest toy doesn't actually send anything and has more backdoors then a Win95 alpha version, now do we? And it automagically has to hook up to a webcam if available, so we can have a laugh as a spammer realizes all his computers are now hosting illegal crap like Britney/Nsync/Linkin Park MP3s, various bad Disney animations as MPGs and files like "SCO_Unixware_kernel.tar.gz" while a RIAA/MPAA APC drives his/her front window!
Bonus points if said program makes a AYB quote the moment the spammer is sued into the nine hells themselves!
Hate me!
How funny! I just discovered and read a story on Kuro5hin about this, written by Mr. Green himself.
hdparm -d is your friend.
from "President" George W. Bush et al.
Have a marijuana-induced day!!
Cheers,
W00t
"Slashdotted!
Not available at the moment due to the Slashdot Effect. Will be back shortly as a (much faster) static page. Thank you for your patience."
So should this be a new error message? I'm thinking 501 - Slashdot...
Computer Science is Applied Philosophy
Here
You aren't actually crashing the "spammer's" box. You're crashing the box of some poor sucker who doesn't know enough to that he should have a firewall (software or hardware), between his computer and his cable/dsl modem. Meanwhile, the spammer just moves on to another of his pool of tens of thousands of broadband IP's which have computers attached to them EXACTLY THE SAME WAY.
So congratualtions, you have successfully made some poor guy's day miserable because his box keeps rebooting and he hasn't an fscking clue why, and you have done exactly nothing to hinder the spammers. Keep up the great work!
...Birth?
Not quite - Slashdot has the wide recognition, but none of the respect. Kuro5hin has far far less recognition but is far more factual, in depth and interesting.
A better comparison would be Slashdot as the New York Post and Kuro5hin as the magazine "The Economist". Both are well known, but the New York Post has a much wider readership, is more recognizable and has more up to date news than The Economist. However, the New York Post is widely thought of as a very sloppy and in many ways incompetant, whereas The economist is widely revered for its truly insightful and important writings.
I'd say a better comparison would be a school newsletter and a parish newsletter.
Oxymoron of the week.
I'd rather do for I in `cat /etc/firewall/spammers.txt`
do
nuke I
done
Read this site or the other. Dont use them both becuase you will get confused!
--NJ state court judge, on acquitting Allen Ginsburg of smoking pot in a newspaper quote.
On that note, I shot five people last night. Sorry to everyone affected.
---------
Together, we will drive the rats from the tundra.
here: http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2003/7/20/192659/148 .
I know you're a troll but for the benefit of other people here...
/dev/hda
hdparm is your friend. Make sure you enable udma transfers. E.g.
hdparm -d1 -X udma6
You can do this for your other drives/cdrom/etc.
For example, without udma I can only burn cd's at around 12x and it uses all of the cpu time. With it on I can burn cd's at 30x and the cpu is virtually 99% free.
In short, configure your computer properly. Even in older windows you had to enable DMA for DVD roms and such.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
Do ham handed laws like 'let's ban free email so the police can track people down' usually pass, or get shot down in Australia?
Eat at Joe's.
"Indeed it is apparent both from the name of the evidence-eliminator-sucks site and from its contents that the sole purpose for its existence is to conduct a defamatory campaign against the good reputation of our client and their product(s)."
What good reputation?
For most systems in Linux I've seen the default is to be running in PIO mode for all drives. I had to write a startup script to hdparm my drives [not too hard].
maybe someone should mod the ide/ata drivers to check if udma is available at boot time and enable it? Then put that in 2.4.22. Ya... that would be good...
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
URGENT NEWSFLASH MONDAY 21 JULY 2003 - YOUR INTERNET TRAFFIC IS BEING ROUTED THROUGH THE CANADIAN ISP GC AND OTTAWA, ONTARIO CANADA - YOU ARE AT VERY HIGH RISK OF INVESTIGATION! As an employee of the federal government, I just happen to have one of those gc.ca email addresses. I didn't realise that gc was an internet provider, but rather a sort of top-level domain name (like .gov for the US). Smaller government organisations contract out for ISPs, other departments provide their own servers. ,P>
Holy paranoia, Batman!. Fear and mistrust of the government(s) is a good and healthy thing, however please know what to be worried about.
I make a reasonable middle-class wage by going to work and not spamming blogs with scams.
It's a shame more /. posts aren't more confusing. It might actually inspire more people to RTFA.
The Economist is an oversimplified comic that puts its "free market" spin on everything. It's revered by a small number of people because it reinforcs what they already believe. Is this the comparison you wanted to make?
Lets face it, /. is only good for its links unless you're actually looking for lies,half truths and distortions.
Is the file being copied from the same physical disk and/or partition? Copying from an extfs to reiserfs partition (or vise versa) is slow in some old versions of Red Hat. Try installing gentoo for bleeding edge performance.
If I were to give you a free subscription to either the New York Post or The Economist, which would you choose?
I'm willing to wager that the average 1-paragraph slashdot story has more spelling, grammatival, and factual errors than the average 10 paragraph k5 story (which isn't just a link to a website).
I got a call from some sales guy from some company once. I was busy, so I told him to send me some literature. Got it, looked at it, wasn't interested, so pitched it.
Apparently the sales guy thought that by sending me junk, he now has the right to call me whenever. First time I told him I wasn't interested, second and third times I added not to call me back. Fourth time I laid into him - he called by bosses number. Fifth time I did some research and sent his boss and a few other high-up's in the company an e-mail explaining how I had nicely asked to stop being bothered by the company and that they have now left a very bad impression, and that I talk with lot of other people that they may want to deal with, and am not afraid of sharing my opinion of a company if asked.
The VP of the company sent me an e-mail back saying (THE SALES GUY) IS DOING A GOOD JOB GETTING THE NAME OUT THERE SO BUY SOME PRODUCTS FROM US. (no lie - all caps).
Upshot is I've not been called anymore.
I look at it like X-10 - they've made some good products, but as soon as marketting/sales starts to lead, even the best company can get dragged downhill.
That sounds like a great Fox special. Anyone know when it airs?
Imagine my dissappointment when I went to the site and there was no video! It was all text. I at least expected grainy video of a street brawl between two nerds: glasses and calculators flying.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Am I the only one who's pissed off enough to employ the same tactic as you? I find your idea to be refreshing. I would use a slightly more lenient tactic though -- concider this.
Spammer: Connecting..
Me: REJECT
Spammer: Connecting..
Me: REJECT
Spammer: Connecting..
Me: Nuke the bastard..
Spammer: BSOD
IANAL but In my country when someone takes a swing at you the first time you can't hit back, not the second time eighther but the third time I can hit back and claim self defence. Since "tech law" is so complex I'd claim self defence this way if I was ever confronted about it. Now, it would be unfortunate if the dude who got nuked was in fact innocent and was being abused by a spammer BUT now i was being abused by his system so I was just defending myself. If people could risk BSOD's for having insecure setup's then it might raise security awareness right?
Well, it wasn't as if I was planning for my *blog* to get slashdotted. But once I realized what was happening (i.e., why my web server's hard drive light was on solid!), it wasn't a big deal. After all, I already knew that GeekCode was slow as a slug, the only reason I used it was because it was the easiest of the PHP-based weblogs for me to modify, and my blog has never gotten more than a few thousand hits a day so the speed didn't matter. But if everybody's coming there for one article... (shrug) serve it to them statically. My web server (which is running FreeBSD, BTW, not Linux) is now quite happy.
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
In the blue corner we have a web site that appears to sell something of use only to crooks and pedophiles. "Evidence Eliminator" sounds about as decent as "Sperm Washer" or "Easy Hotwire".
In the red corner we have a shrill and somewhat incoherent geek with time to waste (and apparently more interested in getting even than getting a job).
Both parties tend to long self-justified rants. We feel sympathy for the red corner because he seems to be motivated by morals rather than money. But wait... he just wants his reputation restored, does not care whether people are ripped off by the product.
The blue corner are obviously the Bad Boys, the tag team of hate. They like shouting at the crowd more than actually getting down to business. We don't know quite what they're shouting about, but frankly, we can't wait for Red Boy to jump into the ring and smash their stupid heads against the ropes.
Only Red Boy seems to lying unconscious on the floor... it's a Knock Out!!! The Slashdot crowd - all ten million of them - have jumped into the ring and are smashing the ref, the Tag Team of Hate, and Red Boy with anything they can get hold of: chairs, empty drink cans,...
Later, order returns to the scene. The ref announces a draw, and everyone asks "what the heck was that about?" No-one seems to know, but one of the bikini-clad girls holding the score signs thinks that whatever it was, it wasn't worth breaking a nail over. She looks at her hand glumly.
I mean... Jesus!!
Ceci n'est pas une signature
"maybe someone should mod the ide/ata drivers to check if udma is available at boot time and enable it? Then put that in 2.4.22. Ya... that would be good..."
What, something like
"CONFIG_IDEDMA_AUTO=y" ?
It's not always compiled into the kernel by default, as in the past DMA caused corruption with some miniscule percentage of drives. But the option has been there forever.
Some distros have also had install-time options to add an rc script to enable DMA. YMMV.
That is like going after gun/car makers. /. the clients, and don't buy any products.
It is the clients that should be put out of business. You hire a spammer, the world hates you. If no one pays the spammer stops spamming.
All your spam are belong to us, what you say... :)
evidence-eliminator.com is blocked by my company's spam/web filter. Haha.
Need Free Juniper/NetScreen Support? JuniperForum
I just went to mirrored e-e-sucks site hosted on tripod, and as I was reading it I happened to notice the banner add at the top of the page, you can only guess what product they were advertising. Do you think EE is gonna pull their tripod adds now? Or is tripod gonna kick the authors mirror?
You might see what the "insightful" spam king Eddy Marin has to say on his homepage.
Yet another big ego spammer claiming they are an ethical marketer and the spam they are doing isn't spam.
i recon the iraqi infomation minister must have got a job writeing there disinformation web page
Roses are Red Violates are Blue im not very good a poetry but i have many other redeming qualitys
The guy wasn't harassing them. All he did was create a website questioning their credibility and listing various claims against them. One has the right to criticize others, especially those who may well be breaking the law. criticism is not harrasment!
read my blog
musings on politics and technol
hdparm -c1 -d1 -u1 -a1 /dev/hda
Speaking of spammer wars, here's a place to engage the enemy: Spammerhunters.
They can run, but they cannot hide.
Great idea, however, if you really want to fuck with them (at least in a legal way), use -j DROP rather than -j REJECT. This should make their system wait for a timeout and thus tie up their spamming engine a bit (well, at least one thread of it)... See this article for more information.
Help save the critically endangered Blue Iguana
Look at their website. Their logo is two lowercase e's, entirely too similiar to the Internet Explorer logo. I wonder what microsoft legal would say?
The Right Reverend K. Reid Wightman,
When I posted in their "discussion board" that this had occurred and pointed out the "Evidence-eliminator-sucks" web page, I was promptly tossed off the system - with no warning or explanation. Even better, I'm still getting the spam email from the web site.
ye olde 1 tesla magnet
The only good spammer is a dead spammer. Which means this article must be about resurecting dead spammers?
When has the average /.er ever worried about legality?
I prefer to think of it as "opt-out" . If they negletected to mention an optout link (or it doesnt work) you reboot there computer untill the mailing list is corrupted and your e-mail address is removed .
Ohhh, I get it, if it's a ./'er doing it to a spammer, it's not just OK, it's great and laudable and perfectly ethical, but if it's the RIAA doing it to a ./'er it's the worst action since the Holocaust and a huge breah of all we hold moral and proper. You people scare me sometimes.
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. - Aldous Huxley
It had to be said.
while [ 1 ] /dev/null 2>& 1
do
wget --user-agent='SpammerFucker' -O - "$1" >
done
with the spammer's URL as paramater.
1) sell your copyright of the picture to someone in the UK
2) person sues for copyright violation
3) ?
4) profit?
Is it just me, or does the EE "dis-information" page remind anyone of the same kind of tactics Scientology uses when writing about its critics?
I actually use Opera or Mozilla at home - I'm at work and have to use IE. Amazing eh!
-- For evil to triumph it is enough that good men do nothing.
Well, has anyone actually read the comments on K5? I admit it left my eyes open in a bewildered gaze to see that nearly all of them were actually bashing Mr. Green for what he has done. Are K5 users even more nuts that your average /. Troll? Can't they stand a statement like "windows losers" anymore?
must be a record do for trolls and morons. Trolls are just as bad as spammers. From now on I browse at +2 only...so sad so many people are so lame. You can run and you can hide but it WILL bite you in the ass one day.
lol! People who don't get out enough and spend too much time on /. soon seem to lose their grip on reality. All this mindless Windows bashing just looks stupid, juvenile, and to be honest, has become quite dull and repetitive. It was funny once - six years ago - but not anymore. I guess all cliques need some sort of ritual to help reinforce their self worth. ;)
500 Internal Server Error
You'd have to start at at least 506 - but then that might be used by later http implementations501 Not Implemented
502 Bad Gateway
503 Service Unavailable
504 Gateway Timeout
505 HTTP Version not supported
better to just add a new block of response codes:
600 Server Slashdotted
601 Databaser fried
602 Redirect to Google Cache
603 Redirect to Goatse.cx
604 Random error from 4xx/5xx code
605 Cowboy Neal
Or just use the HTTP response that I seem to get a lot when viewing slashdot:
417 Expectation Failed
.02
cLive ;-)
-- Trinity in high heels carrying a whip: The donimatrix - there is no spoonerism
As for their ethics, yes, their ethics suck. Their advertising says you'll go to jail if you don't use their product, they have popup scare ads that display your hard drive (if you're using Windows) and says that they're looking at your hard drive and you better buy their software or all those porn gifs will get you thrown in jail (it's a simple btw, with C:\ as the source -- i.e., it's just displaying your hard drive to yourself), and then of course there is the virus that their affiliates are sending around to hijack people's web browsers and point it back to the Evidence Eliminator site, and ... well. I think you're getting the picture now. These are not Nice Folks. And if we can trace that virus back to their offices, they will be wearing stripes soon.
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
Here's all you have to see to know what type of people these folks are, if they're still allowing links from slashdot. I could hit this page from my grandmother's PC and it would present me with the same sort of rhetoric. If they're rejecting links from slashdot, open a new browser window and go to http://www.evidence-eliminator.com/go.shtml to see the scare tactics these guys use to drum up business.
-- Jeff Clough, Humble Programmer
But not now. Sorry, gotta get back to job hunting, have a couple of people to hit with resumes (thanks to tips from the Conspiracy). Who sez that getting even and getting a job are incompatible? :-).
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
US law is much less restrictive. The First Amendment is held to encourage "robust debate", even if some the statements aren't entirely correct.
"aliante"?
I'm guessing you mean "alienate".
Doesn't it sound like a Fox reality show? NEXT! ON FOX! WHEN SPAMMERS ATTACK!
Eric lives in the US. I don't know why he cares in the slightest what a UK court might say to him.
If you search google for "evidence eliminator" there are many companies in this field.
www.evidence-eliminator.com, but the site seems to be down or slashdotted.
www.evidenceeliminator.us, looks like a separate company
www.evidence--eliminator.com, also looks like a separate company
www.evidence-eliminate.co.uk, also looks like a separate company.
I have seen a few pages on the net where they try to alter your default search page in Exlorer(that bar to the left too)(crtl-f i think). So after visiting that page, your explorer would now do it's surfing with a nice "evidence eliminator" logo at the top.
my sig
Ah, yes, that one. People were standing around outsides McDonalds restaurants giving out flyers that accused them of various unfortunate things. If memory serves, they took the flyer producers to court on defamation grounds, and successfully rebutted a couple of the points, notably including the fact that their food was found to be nutritious by the court. A few days later, the flyers were back, with the claims the court found against removed, and a big banner over the rest basically saying "PROVEN IN COURT!".
If ever there were an own goal in a legal case, that was probably it. Anyone have a link to detailed info any more? Makes fun reading if you've got a few minutes to kill. :-)
Incidentally, there is some legal protection for freedom of expression in the UK, including under the ECHR if memory serves. However, what's wrong with defamation law overriding freedom of expression? You want to be able to say anything you like with impunity, even if it's wrong and damaging to someone? I have no problem with a clear standard that if you want to say things negative things about someone else publicly then you have to be able to back them up. Why is that a problem, either in principle or in practice?
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
c'mon, read between the lines. Mr. Green did not mindlessly bash windows users, he used these words in a funny reference as to why he's running his website (read his comments). The selfrighteous fury that some (if not most) of the K5 users show up with just does not compute. After all, he's going for spammers, not for them.
I can't fault someone for setting limits on how much effort to spend on that turd. And if he didn't have opinions and wasn't afraid to say them, do you think he would have gotten this far? :^P
Since anyone who would buy that evidence-excriment is (a) a Windows user, (b) a loser, he's not exactly wrong. (Blunt, but not wrong.)
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Is there a chance we can run a follow up to this story next week...just so we can screw up their servers one more time. Rarely have I gone to slashdotted site and didnt mind.
Of course, they could sent you folks a letter for a DOS attack and plaster your faces on their site.
z.
There, that had to be said too!
The RIAA goes after people on a whiff of suspicion. They don't care what they do to anyone -- they just want to sue/harass people into buying their stuff.
So the RIAA talks about hacking into people's computers on suspicion, and rooting around in the system, to see if they have anything -- or worse yet, uploading a trojan to people.
This guy, on the other hand, is simply sending reboot code to an address that has intruded on his system to send a spam. He knows where the spam has come from.
Now there's a caveat here; it'd be more appropriate to send the reboot code to whoever paid for the spam, if it's some online pharmacy or somesuch. Make them realize that if they spam, nobody will buy their stuff, because their site will NEVER BE ONLINE AGAIN.
But that wouldn't work with a 419 scammer, or the asian varieties. So we revert back to turning off, even just briefly, the source of the spam.
Your RIAA analogy was flawed. The better analogy would be to have someone catch the RIAA snooping around in his system, and shut down THEIR intrusion box.
In either case -- Spammers or RIAA -- it's not the guy fighting back who's in the wrong.
Just read it -- in between the rhetoric he makes all the traditional points:
#1 -- You have to be on your tippy-toes to avoid "opting in" in the way Spammers think "opt in" means; namely, giving them/someone they know/your friend's cat/a total stranger/your school/your workplace/anyplace they can hack into your email address.
This in direct opposition to what Opt-In really is: they send you a one-time email, which you have to explicitly confirm by doing a reply and/or click-back before they send you anything.
#2 -- That they are somehow legitimate businesses. Sorry Eddy, but it doesn't add up. Especially since even the "legitimate" businesses spam us. I haven't gotten K-fucking-asses-mart to get one of my forwarding aliases off their damned bluelight email list yet, because some marketroid decided it'd be cheap to buy a few cds full of spidered emails.
K-Mart and the rest. Doesn't matter what they're selling, I won't buy from them if they email me about it. The only place that has authorization to email me back is Amazon, but that is because I ACTUALLY WENT AND ORDERED STUFF FROM THEM FIRST.
Make some sense here Eddy? You have no right to try to bug me to create a business relationship, and you buying/spidering an email address doesn't count as a business relationship.
#3 -- It was hidden a little more, but: to give a phone number/physical address of his business would be his death knell.
In the real world, a phone number and address of the business are the first things we want. I expect the same of anyone I buy from online as well: that I know exactly where they are should something go wrong. Amazon I know exactly where they are.
Eddy on the other hand fronts for sex-aids and porn and all the other crap that won't even put their return address on what they shipped. The local post office has tons of unreturnable dildos from people like that.
If we had his phone number and address he'd never have a moment's peace.
Hey, can anybody get this guy's address for us?
I feel like mailing someone a box of what my cat did last night.
hmmm, I've now seen this post with *BSD and Mac now. Its about time we got a linux version of this troll. Truly cross-platform!
In case now one else knows what I'm talking about, this post is an old Mac troll. I've seen it reposted with BSD subbed for Mac too. Too funny!
C Pungent
Your hard drive must be having problems. As with the other posts, you should look at hdparm.
To give a comparison of speed, my dual Athlon MP 1600+ (1.4 Ghz) with 256 Mb of RAM and two old harddrives from other computers can transfer 438 Mbs in 37.28 seconds using only 19% of my CPU.
i hear that, go freebsd. :)
RedHat is for people who hate windows, freebsd is for people who love unix.
Red Hat is for people who hate Windows, FreeBSD is for people who love Unix.
www.putertech.net
What a fucking loser you are.
About being uninterested in Windows: Perhaps he has studied it and come to the conclusion that it does not meet his needs now, and will not in the near future. To use your providers analogy, I am not interested in AOL, because I do not believe that it will live up to my requirements in a service.
And I think in this case, he's entirely uninterested in their phony piece of software, but he hates the company and its marketing tactics with a vengeance. I mean, as a skinny geek I'm uninterested in weight-loss plans, but I really hate those stupid ads they send out for them.
BTW, your note on Linux only holds for good Windows software. I really, truly don't care when Bonzai Buddy comes out for Linux.
I hereby place the above post in the public domain.
GameDev.net uses a couple 600Mhz (give or take a hundred mhz) Celerons to serve up it's forums. You may want to consider more ram and/or checking your code for bloat. RAM is cheap and it takes a bit of physical ram for every connection which may be part of the cause of the connection errors.
I had a P200 with 96MB of ram running Win2K with Apache that pulled off 1 million page views in a month. Static pages. If you're looking to run a serious site (and by your alexa rating I'd say you're doing relativly well) it's worth the $500 or less needed to put together a more modern system. Then use the Celeron as a file server for additional web-space or whatever.
I'm now running on a 1.0Ghz Duron with 512MB of ram on a 256Kbit DSL line and even when I'm getting slammed the server is doing fine. There has only been a couple occasions where I couldn't get to the site behind the NAT. I just waited a bit and it was fine.
I'll be up to a 1Mbit line both ways late next week and I'm not expecting any problems with the system being overloaded.
Ben
http://www.recycledrussianbrides.com: Because love deserves a second chance
Work Safe Porn
Today, VioPac would like to offer you a quiz. It's very easy, and will take only moments of your time. In fact, it only has one question, and it is this: What rocks more, Iron Maiden or Evidence Eliminator? Think about that carefully now.
The correct answer, of course, is Iron Maiden. In fact, there is very little out there that could beat Maiden in any contest you care to devise. Observe:
Simply put, the spammers at Evidence Eliminator have now threatened the ISP that hosts Evidence-Eliminator-Sucks.com with a libel suit in England. As intended, the ISP in question can't afford to defend itself in a foreign country. What this means is that every one of you, regardless of your nation of origin, should write to Iron Maiden immediately and ask them, politely of course, to find these EvElim scumbag spammers and beat the shit out of them.
Note: I don't think he's *really* serious about writing to Iron Maiden :-).
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
2003-07-18 02:55:55 Yet another notorious spammer resorts to a SLAPP (articles,censorship) (rejected)
I wonder if the admins have it in for me, submitted a pile of relevant and maybe even marginally interesting articles that all wound up rejected (had one rejected literally within seconds of submission).
*sigh* Ohwell.
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
By getting the website of Evidence Eliminator linked to someplace in this thread, you know that the spammers site will get slashdotted, smoking his pitiful server, and driving the bandwidth bill into the obscene-osphere
I have visions of the site owner falling to the canyons below in a manner very much remindful of the wiley coyote when he figures this out.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
No, it's more a case that the mighty web server of BadTux Enterprises has a lofty 64 megabytes of memory, and Linux has gotten a bit too bloated to like running in 64 megabytes of memory. As a firm advocate of "the right tool for the right job", FreeBSD and its "jail" mechanism were the right tool for the job -- pretty much the lightest footprint I could get that would run on that rather pathetic hardware. And my confidence was justified -- once I killed off the PHP/MySQL code that was sucking up all my memory and causing it to thrash like a demon, it handled the full bandwidth of a 512kb DSL line with not an issue, not even burping past 10% on the CPU usage scale.
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
... that every time you enter "evidence eliminator" into google and then click on the text ad leading to http://www.evidence-eliminator.com/ .... it might cost them a few cents.
It seems like the forum community over there is made up entirely of trolls. And I thought slashdotters flew off the handle a little too easily. These guys make slahdotters seem like mr rogers.
If you take a look back through history, can you find many examples where vigilante justice ever achieved a good level of order for a prolonged period? Or do you find it tends to be followed by a more organised, recognised influence that brings the order with it?
Over here in the UK, we're all too familiar with vigilante justice right now. One of our popular newspapers "named and shamed" large numbers of paedophiles not long ago. As a result, many people who just happened to look similar (to any one of the dozens of people pictured) were attacked. Some had to leave their homes. One paediatrician -- someone who had spent their whole career looking after children -- was the subject of a serious abuse, because stupid people thinking they were right didn't understand the long words, and decided the paediatrician was a child abuser.
I live in a country where guns are easily available to criminals if they want them, but illegal for the general population to carry. Most criminals don't bother with them, most people who get killed in gun crimes are themselves criminals, and although I'm no big fan of Tony Blair, claiming he's overthrown our government seems a bit excessive.
You could try doing something sensible, like, say, having your top level infrastructure providers cut theirs out of the network until they agree the adhere to a common code of practice. The Internet was built by the West, particularly the US and a few places in Europe, and it wouldn't be so hard for a centralised administration and control structure -- something which is coming, like it or not -- to impose such a restriction (ahem... "condition of membership") and cut out places that don't comply. Bingo, many of the spam mails, viruses, inappropriate newsgroup ads, abusive web pages and such that are currently reducing the signal/noise ratio of the Internet daily disappear.
Or because it thinks it's better than everyone else, interferes unduly with affairs outside its own borders to promote its own best interests at the expense of others, and worst of all, is arrogant about it.
And please read my post again. I didn't say everbody hates America, contrary to what your quotes suggest. I implied that many people do, and now more than ever, you guys really need to wake up to that fact and ask yourselves why. Sticking your heads in the sand by modding down some anonymous guy on Slashdot to (-1, Don't Agree With You) isn't going to fix the problem.
Would that be in comparison to having someone over whom neither I, nor my government, nor even their own has any control coming to my home country and accidentally destroying my livelihood on a whim?
And incidentally, your government (assu
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
I disagree with the conclusions, but it's a good argument.
Almost nobody will see it otherwise because it was written by an AC, though.
Get off my launchpad!
It has been a while since I followed the EE stuff, but don't some of their referral spammers and web sites who link to EE use illegal stuff like child porn?
This strikes me as a "good" way for them to really get sales, people would be really scared if this was the case and would probably have more of a guarantee for sales then using regular porn. In their case their scare tactic works, the person who got this wouldn't report it out of fear of being investigated and jailed.
If that was the case they just like other places that use referrals can just blame who ever had that referral (if it wasn't themselves), lie that they do not support that tactic, and claim that it is being investigated while the referral person gets paid and they sets up a new account.
that the evil folks in question have been /.ed (evidence-eliminator.com has been timing out for the past couple of hours , yet green's page stays up? geeks 1, spammers 0
Skill is successfully walking a tightrope over Niagara Falls. Intelligence is not trying. -- Anonymous
So, what are the names of 1) the company, 2) the obnoxious salesman, and 3) the idiot VP?
How are they ever going to learn not to harass people if there are no consequences for this kind of behavior?
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Stop flaming for a few minutes and get past the second paragraph of the article, and you'll see that it has nothing to do with your OS war.
This has nothing to do with windows/linux, its just an account of what this guy went through with an unscrulpulous company, likely headed by one person. Next time read the article instead of taking one line and blowing it out of proportion just to get your insightful points.
The procedures recommended by the US Department of Defense for disposal of hard drives used to handle secure documents should work even better on a spammer.
Tech Public Policy stuff
Not all Nottingham companies are evil!
{:-)
Tux Games. Your complete source for native Linux games.
is UUNET UK. They have been contacted. They are aware that they're hosting a notorious spam operation (listed in the SPEWS spammer list) on their network. They're not interested in disconnecting the EE guys, because "we're MCI-Worldcom, we don't care as long as they pay their bills, we own half the Internet backbone so we don't have to care haha!".
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
I understand your argument, and I agree that from your starting assumptions it makes sense. I just disagree with your starting assumptions.
The Internet is not a lawless place. Far from it. The kind of infrastructure that makes it up doesn't just happen. There are organising groups behind it, though it's easy to forget that.
Moreover, the Internet is not so wildly new and different to everything else that's gone before as some people make out. The same principles of law can apply here as elsewhere; with the exception of international issues, which obviously occur far more often on the Internet than otherwise, there's not much that needs to change. Fraud is still fraud. Defamation is still defamation. Copyright is still copyright. Same old story, and why shouldn't it be?
Now, granted the Internet throws up some different background to cases than you might otherwise see -- the culture of P2P for example, and the international dimension mentioned above. The legal system seems to recognise the similarities to the rest of the world better than your average geek, though it's been slow to adapt to the particular circumstances of Internet cases. But the framework is there. People are successfully prosecuted for committing crimes on the Internet, and have been for years.
Now, the traditional answer to resolving international problems is diplomacy. Your nation's representatives discuss your problems with the other guys, and hopefully you form some sort of treaty for mutual benefit that overcomes the problems. Where a nation is not prepared to co-operate, you can impose sanctions, restrict your business dealings with them. In this case, the sanction is obvious: someone not prepared to play by the same rules as everyone else gets cut out of the network.
There are groups in place that can do this, now, today. If there weren't, these places wouldn't be on the Internet in the first place. What's needed is to give those groups an incentive to get their act together, and the way to do that in a modern society is to contact your own representatives and impress on them the need for action. This is happening more and more every day, as problems like spam mails and viruses interfere more and more with the effective use of the Internet by individuals and businesses alike.
But what we need now is a calm, measured, systematic solution. This is the twenty-first century, not the eighteenth, and we have more powerful and sophisticated tools to resolve these issues than "Mine's bigger than yours is, so nah!" All the sort of vigilantism you're advocating does is get in the way, and distract from the real problems.
Just to be clear, no, I don't have a whole lot of sympathy for a spammer whose system gets fried by such an action, although I'm very wary of collateral damage.
It occurs to me that there's a fairly obvious parallel between condoning vigilantism here and letting the RIAA toast the machines of people illegally copying MP3s springs to mind at this point. Notice how many Slashdotters objected vehemently to that proposition when the subject came up a few weeks ago. Would you agree with letting the RIAA do that? Your argument thus far would support them, it seems.
Personally, I disagree with that as well, for just the same reasons that I disagree with e-vigilantism generally. I'd just prefer it if there were a more sensible punishment -- a significant fine to make it financially unattractive to spam, for example -- or, better still, reasonable punishments plus an Internet framework robust enough that such spam attacks were technically much harder in the first place as well.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.